Eo (2022)

I have really flipped for Jerzy Skolimowsksi's Eo. This is a film about a donkey who works in a circus and an odyssey that takes the donkey from the Polish circus through a range of experiences. It's deeply moving, and I fell in love with it. Eo is quite obviously based on or a retelling of Robert Bresson's wonderful Au Hasard Balthazar, but Skolimowski's film is designed as a kind of portrait of modern humanity that feels deeply unnerving and sometimes confusing if frequently beautiful. Eo contains these amazing interludes – occasionally lit red – in which we watch the world upside down or backwards, or we watch a robot dog hunt something. Skolimowski is insisting that we look at the world differently, that we don't settle into complacent ideas about the world's beauty or the purity of animals or clichés like this. He is using film to ask us to see differently, to unsettle our typical ways of watching and thinking. 

Eo is a film about our relationships with animals, the complete unimportance of our very high melodramas from their perspective, and our total disregard for animal welfare. It's fascinating and beautiful and totally compelling, and Skolimowski's writing is impeccable.

One note on the title. I really don't understand why the distributors changed the title to EO instead of the original Io, and I absolutely do not understand the commitment to capitalizing it – I am equally baffled by people who keep writing TÁR, too. These are names. The donkey is called Io (pronounced eee-oh because we're in Poland), and the Todd Field film is named after its main character, Lydia Tár. The caps make no sense. This isn't CODA. Part of Eo/Io takes place in Italy, as well, where Io, of course, means I – the implication being that the donkey is all of us... 

But more importantly Io is a classical reference that I would expect many people to get. Jupiter's moon Io is even named after the mythical figure! Io was a mortal woman, beloved by Zeus, who was transformed into a cow. To my mind, the resonance here is unmistakable. Skolimowski is asking us to look at this donkey from a different perspective, and indeed asking us to look from the donkey's perspective, but one of the points here is that a donkey is not so different from a human, and yet we treat donkeys as if they are. Is Io a cow or a young woman? And do we treat her as if she's a cow once we know she was once human?